> "In 2022, more than a decade after Brumbelow’s tests, NHTSA updated its rules. Even then, the agency acted only after the passage of a federal law directing it to do so."
Not going to defend NHTSA here, but it's a good idea to pass laws like this. NHTSA would likely have been sued if they passed the rule. Having a law really cuts down on the lawsuits.
After reading 5th Risk by Michael Lewis, I updated my thinking about government agencies. Government agencies are often quite limited by law and cannot advocate for effective policies. Lawmakers really should be updating rules much more often in consultation with agency scientists and specialists. I feel like we've gotten used to lawmakers not doing the jobs they are elected to.
I also believe that we should have a Greenhouse Gas Administration, and not rely on the EPA and Clean Air and Water Acts to cover CO2.
Even from the perspective of keeping authoritative powers held within the reins of the people, it is better for rules and regulations to be legislated into proper laws by the legislature.
Legislatures are voted in by and answer to the people, at least ostensibly. Government agencies don't necessarily answer to the people.
Yet legislators are in the grasp of associations, who want no such legislation to occur and either block it or never allow it to be proposed. They are in the clutches of corporations & oligarchs.
> The beefier, more robust rear guards would’ve cost an additional $127 each, according to industry estimates.
> They said there’s not enough research to support a government mandate, which would impose huge costs on businesses that operate on thin profit margins.
So thin that they can't afford $127 a truck; they are running a no profit charity out of the goodness of their heart and that pittance of an one-time amount per truck would push them over into red.
Make them liable and their insurer will tell them to upgrade their trucks. As soon as you make this about money, the problem goes away. Right now the issue is "oops I did it again" style accidents where everybody just shrugs "what can you do?!" and "that's just the way things work". As soon as people are on the spot for millions in damages, they'll start getting very pro-active about preventing that from happening. And in the business world that means insurers start paying attention because it's them that pay these damages.
That's also what has driven safety changes in passenger cars. Cars have all sorts of technology on board to keep drivers and other traffic participants safe. Liability insurance is not optional so insurers are on the spot when things go badly wrong. So, technology that saves lives saves them money. So, they apply pressure and incentives to make sure vehicle owners buy vehicles where they can get favorable insurance rates.
The reason that so far hasn't happened with trucks is because police and judges go easy on the truckers when bad stuff happens. So they aren't on the spot financially and their insurers aren't either. It's not their problem. Making it their problem is the fix.
> That's also what has driven safety changes in passenger cars.
No, it's not - at least not in Europe. As long as a vehicle complies to the standards in force when it was built and the type license issued to the manufacturer then, you're not required to retrofit anything to old(er) vehicles. You're still allowed to drive a 70s era car with no seatbelts and only a driver side mirror if you want to do so.
Change got always enforced by lawmakers - for example, people didn't flock to ABS equipped cars for decades, until the car industry agreed to only sell cars with ABS back in 2004. Hell it took until 2006 for an EU mandate for seat belts for rear passengers.
wouldn't that mostly be covered under various member state's laws?
Iirc, you'd still get charged here if you weren't wearing a seatbelt even if the car was missing them. (based on my limited experience riding in the back of vans with no rear seats.)
If I were a truck driver, I would go out of my way to avoid becoming a killer. But we see it all the times, they fighting to avoid doing even the bare minimum. They kill people and blame the "blind zone", but refuse to spend a few bucks on upgraded sensors/alerts and camera monitors.
I hope my city bans these kind of vehicles in the city streets. I like London's Direct Vision Standard, only allowing trucks with lowered seating and wide/tall side windows. https://i.ytimg.com/vi/i-P20wdrcAQ/maxresdefault.jpg
That is not entirely true: owner-operators might be responsible for the front underride guard.
However the March 2019 GAO report notes that
1. There are no front guards available on the market for retrofitting conventional cabs.
2. There are arguments about their necessity, as conventional cabs tend to have lower frame and bumpers, thus partially fulfilling that role
3. Though it would have to be checked on a case-by-case basis and against clear standards, as bumper heights vary (hence a 2010 NTSB recommendation that the NHTSA develop performance standards, amongst various other recommendations around underride.
A driver is responsible for the condition of the vehicle they drive. You would refuse to drive a vehicle with faulty breaks. In the same vein, I think they should collectively refuse to trucks without proper security measures.
Brakes are mandatory, rails preventing people from ending up under the truck not it seems (in the US, in Europe they are). So, it is up to regulators to make the mandatory. And it is lobbyists preventing that, and those lobbyists are not working on behalf of truck drivers.
You're not really refuting my point, which is that the truck drivers should be working on demanding stuff like this. Lobbying themselves, or as a union require certain standards before accepting a haul etc.
This protects Others while brakes protect the Self....
The reason they care about breaks and not this is because this doesn't protect them specifically and so they don't give a shit, because they're raging narcissists.... As I have a feeling someone "in this room" is as well...
I would be immensely surprised if they ended up actually costing $127 in practice. I expect that's very much a best case scenario (lowest bidder estimate for unregulated side guards with no installation costs).
That $127 a trailer is the differences in cost and it was in 1980s dollars. So I would expect a retrofit to be whatever the cost of the Mansfield bars are on their own, plus labor, as it would cost today.
Fortunately the IIHS has been pushing trailer manufacturers to make the change, so newer trailers would not need a retrofit.
It's only worth doing if it actually saves enough lives per $ to be better than the other things we could do with that money. For context, NICE currently only pays for treatments that give over 1 QALY per £30k because that's all the NHS budget can support. If those bars cost $500 and needed to be installed on five million trucks and only saved 20 lives on average across the country then that would be an extremely poor return on investment and the money should be put towards cancer screening or paying off the national debt or improved road signage or something.
$500 is well more than triple the estimated cost per truck, and we already know that at least 400 people are being killed per year in the US. Likely far more, not to mention the grievously injured. Cost per unit would likely come down over time anyway as production practices improve, like with most goods. I understand the logic behind cost/benefit, but the math is pretty damn obvious here.
I think the article could have done a better job of portraying the side of the industry. The majority cost is probably fuel efficiency. At the end of the article, they describe a new technical solution which is more light weight, involving a polyester mesh and steel, instead of just steel.
When you think about it, that’s an argument FOR requiring these regulations early, like back in the 70s when the issue was on the table. Because when you DO put safety first, engineering now has a bounded problem that they can improve on quickly (which engineers are particularly good at). So, stupid all-around, and tens of thousands of people died for no good reason.
Yeah but the article claims they just have a flap without any support, so no improved safety. Having actual sideguards adds weight independent of the aerodynamic issue.
Maybe 1,000 lbs of weight, so instead of 40,000 lbs cargo trailer would be limited to 39,000 lbs, but lots of people would not get decapitated. There is also no reason why states could not allow extra 1,000 lbs of total vehicle weight when trailer is equipped with side-guards.
Absolutely! I pointed this out only to address the arguments from the industry side, as far as I understand them. I’ve seen many debates getting hijacked by “smart” contrarians who are accusing people of misrepresenting the issue.
>An investigator with the local police department blamed the collision on the truck driver, who was initially charged with negligent homicide, though charges were eventually dropped
I wonder why.
Another issue is the size of trucks. The state where I lived:
* Truck size was limited, large trucks were only allowed on one Highway. Goods were transferred to smaller Trucks for transport to factories.
* Driving trucks on Sundays was not allowed.
* Large Trucks were not allowed on City Streets. Since this happened it is open season on bicycle riders.
Reagan de-regulated and Trucks can be any size, plus they can clog the roads on Sunday. The last item I do not know when it was enabled, but it happened after Reagan.
I now heard of trucks with 3 trailers but never saw one. I think it is about time we limit sizes to what existed on the 60s. If you need 3 trailers, time to go back to freight trains.
> Reagan de-regulated and Trucks can be any size, plus they can clog the roads on Sunday. The last item I do not know when it was enabled, but it happened after Reagan.
If you want federal highway money, then your highways need to conform to federal standards. These standards allow for trailers up to 53' in length and up to 80,000lbs to operate without any prior authorization as long as they otherwise conform to vehicle standards.
States are always free to turn down the money and enact whatever standards they like; however, the standards seem incredibly reasonable to me and not at all something you can simply blame on a single President passing laws sent to him by Congress. States also have the task of enforcing laws on the highway and can operate commercial vehicle checkpoints.
> I now heard of trucks with 3 trailers but never saw one. [...] time to go back to freight trains.
You're still limited by overall length. FedEx will often operate two short trailers in an articulated tandem. They do this for what I hope are obvious reasons that cannot be fulfilled by rail transport.
How is prohibiting truck transport on Sunday good for other road users? You'd be eliminating 14% of hours in the week, which means a corresponding higher density of trucks on non-Sunday days
Coming from countries where truck transport is not allowed on Sundays - it's great. Means that if you're going with your family somewhere on Sunday it's very quiet on the roads. Also awesome for long distance driving, always plan those for a Sunday and the traffic flows much smoother. As for the idea that it moves the traffic to other days - no it doesn't, because a lot of that traffic wouldn't be driving on Sunday anyway - most businesses are closed on Sundays anyway.
Isn't this just a somewhat arbitrary benefit for people who have Sundays free? Lots of people have to work Sundays. It seems like a lottery that some people will benefit from and some will suffer from, for no good reason.
Some EU countries or regions thereof ban both truck traffic and retail trade on Sundays – and there aren’t many people that would be working on a Sunday outside of retail trade. The vast, vast majority of the population there has Sunday free.
Here in Berlin plenty of people work on Sunday (service industry, gas stations) but all grocery stores are closed and the number of people working is significantly less than in NYC for instance. I like it this way ... but do kind of miss NY too :-)
Please no. Sundays in Belgium were awful. Nothing to do.
At least now in the USA I can go do what I want. It's like any other day. I don't need to stuff everything in my Saturday.
And if that means that I'll pass a couple of Semi trucks? No problem. Hell, I'll move out of the way for them. After all, there isn't a single thing in my hands that hasn't been delivered by a truck.
He's implying the same laws that say you can't drive trucks on a Sunday, also restrict other labor, or make it uneconomical (e.g. having to pay mandatory overtime for weekend hours performed).
He's wrong anyway, there's no ban on general trucking on the weekends in Belgium, only oversized loads. He is right about strict labor laws, you'll barely find any open stores on a Sunday, besides restaurants, bars and some other forms of entertainment.
But yeah, God forbid you can't go to the European equivalent of a Best Buy on a Sunday, so some retail worker can enjoy their weekend.
Perhaps traffic flows smoother because there is just less traffic altogether on Sunday. And anyway, who is operating these trucks that would be driving on Sunday if it was legal, but instead don't drive at all? If trucks aren't driving on Sunday anyway then there is little need to ban them.
Truck traffic is banned in several EU countries on Sundays and rural communities love it. Families in villages where the sole street is the tertiary road running through, don’t have to worry on Sundays about their children playing outside along that road.
A lot less SUVs in Central and Eastern Europe than in North America. But yes, some of the pressure on limiting truck traffic through rural areas on Sundays (or on some roads in general) came from a large amount of fatal collisions involving trucks passing through, whereas ordinary car drivers drive more cautiously through these villages.
>A lot less SUVs in Central and Eastern Europe than in North America.
Not really the point but thanks. Pretty sure a collision with any 2000lb metal shape isn't going to go well.
>some of the pressure on limiting truck traffic through rural areas on Sundays (or on some roads in general) came from a large amount of fatal collisions involving trucks passing through, whereas ordinary car drivers drive more cautiously through these villages.
If that was the point, then boy was that a terrible solution. Rather than fixing the root cause you have 'fixed' the problem 1/7 days of the week. The other 6/7 days of the week you have drivers coming through so bad at driving they banned driving one day out of the week.
> Pretty sure a collision with any 2000lb metal shape isn't going to go well.
In spite of that weight, lower speeds plus more awareness from the locals driving cars combine to mean lower risk of fatality.
> Rather than fixing the root cause
What is it to fix the “root cause” according to you? Sometimes the building of a new motorway to take trucks away from those roads, takes years. To build other roads in a village where children can play may not be feasible in the short-term due to surrounding agriculture or marshy ground. If, as you favour, trucks were allowed to run through every day in the meantime, there would be no day of the week children could play so safely outside.
I can't speak for the commenter you're replying to, but there is an alternative to just building more highways in the form of traffic calming measures. Small villages and towns really shouldn't have through-traffic moving through them at high speeds. Or even moderate speeds, if we're being realistic; pedestrians will usually survive the initial impact at 20mph or less, whereas at 36mph it's usually fatal.[0]
Traffic calming sends a very clear, very obvious signal to drivers: slow the f*ck down, because you don't have a choice. It can include big tree branches hanging out over the road, narrower lanes, pinchpoints, speed humps and raised pedestrian crossings, and more.[1] Many of which are relatively low-cost to implement. Certainly, it's far cheaper than building a new highway.
I doubt that those rules were implemented strictly because of pedestrian safety versus expectations of Sunday as a "rest day" versus latching onto it as a post hoc justification--or really just an extra perk--for the rule. And hey, if it does make Sunday a bit safer for kids to play, it's not like that's a bad thing. It's just that the next thought should be "well, how do we make the other six days safer as well?"
That was the most interesting to me since Sunday evening is one of the heaviest trucking days of the week here. If you're coming back from an all weekend event on the Interstate it will be jam packed with big rigs.
> The truck edged out of a driveway and began, slowly, to turn left onto the road, blocking traffic in both directions. It was as if someone had erected a big steel wall.
I'm guessing that the charges were likely dropped because they couldn't prove that the truck suddenly entered a lane of traffic, having no right-of-way, and leaving the oncoming vehicle no time to stop.
Nothing is cheaper or more efficient and green then shipping by rail. We used to have an amazing rail network in NA (eu still does) and we basically have letf it fall into ruin and become a shell of what would constitute a functioning railway. It literally has done everything possible to kill passenger rail and make shipping via rail painful / unreliable.
If we had not trucking wouldn’t be the only option and we would be better for it
Trucking is expensive. If you care about cost, you're gonna trade off time to use a more cost efficient method, like a train.
Where trucks do have the advantage is truckers though. You can saddle them with debt and take all their money as varying fees, then reposses their home and get some new rube to take out a loan to buy it from you.
The truckers are plentiful, and willing to bleed our for a couple crumbs, which is a much better deal than trains where the conductors are union employees. It's much harder to make them take out debt to pay you more
The answer is more, smaller, trucks / vans. If trucking creates jobs then a great way to create MORE jobs is to have smaller trucks. With smaller loads you lower the element of danger as well as lowering the barrier to entry. Additionally with smaller loads transfer's can be accomplished much more quickly with smaller equipment. Hot shot trucking is already pretty popular and typically works out to be cheaper. The idea overall idea would be an expansion of the interior ports network with loads small enough that drivers can self service.
> I now heard of trucks with 3 trailers but never saw one.
In Oregon, they are only allowed on I-5 between Eugene and Portland, must be less than 105 feet total, and not allowed at night, weekends, holidays, etc.
They use shorter trailers.. but man, that last trailer is doing lots of swaying back and forth..
I saw the PBS documentary yesterday. If I am not mistaken, one of the accidents mentioned involved a Chevy Silverado [1]. If so, then the lobbyists are full of it.
On the whole, I don't understand why the objection is there: are bars all that expensive? For comparison, here are Daimler trucks sold in India [2] - side protection is clearly visible. (Admittedly, they are high-end trucks as far as the Indian market is concerned.)
> The beefier, more robust rear guards would’ve cost an additional $127 each, according to industry estimates.
I'm inclined to think that 127 USD (even if the side rails were a little bit more expensive because they're larger) is not too expensive for a feature like this.
Also, I think that in Europe these rails are already mandatory. At least the rear guard is required in The Netherlands if the trailer protrudes >60cm at the rear iirc.
I think that $127 is for when then first tried to pass it in the 80s. But even after inflation, and price raises, and whatever calculations we do... That's a ridiculously cheap price for a security feature. That's not even the price for installing a bunch of airbags.
I'm not in the market (nor the region), but for a new semi-truck plus bed I guess you're going to expend north of $200K. A thousand or two in security features is absolutely nothing. So instead of a low percentage of vehicles expending a little money on security features, they want the rest of the world to buy way more expensive and ridiculously big cars? Upgrading a single vehicle to a SUV would be way more expensive than their upgrades.
Regular cars have all sorts of active and passive safety features for the people inside, and for pedestrians and other vehicles outside, and that's fine. I don't tell pedestrians to buy an armor if they want to be safe when I'm driving around.
The strength requirements are similar to the US standard (resistance to point loads of 50kN at 1/8th of the horizontal member from the outside, 100kN at the centerline, and 50kN at 355~635mm from the centerline), but the EU has mandated front and side guards (as well as back which the US also mandates) since 1994.
Of note: a 2012 IIHS study indicated that only 15% of collisions between cars and large trucks were rear collisions , 22% are to the side of the truck, and 63 to the front.
They only need to slow and control the car's stop so that it doesn't slip under too far. In this case there is no perfect, but a massive improvement in safety in just three box steel sections should be a very palatable regulation. Apparently it is too much to ask.
> Year after year, federal officials at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the country’s primary roadway safety agency, ignored credible scientific research and failed to take simple steps to limit the hazards of underride crashes.
NHTSA officials don't have time to do that of course, they are too busy denying right to repair in order to "protect" motorists https://youtube.com/watch?v=2nXVljRUnoc
As an external observer (I don't live in the USA) it seems to me that the NHTSA is captured by lobbyists, as a result it is currently only there to protect the interests of auto makers, instead of protecting traffic safety. Why is this illegal behaviour not investigated?
NHTSA definitely seems like one of the more dysfunctional agencies. The US headlight standard from 1967 has never been updated to allow modern adaptive headlight designs despite at least two decades of requests from car manufacturers.
Congress finally forced NHTSA to take action in 2021 with a timeline of two years, but they still aren't available because now the NHTSA is dragging their feet on testing. Meanwhile American car companies like Ford sell adaptive headlights overseas but we make do with 1960's technology in the US. I wonder how many lives have been lost in the meantime?
Congress put it in a bill. Not sure exactly what happens if they don't do anything, but I wouldn't be surprised if the car companies sued, because it seems like they've been asking for this for a long time.
H.R.3684 - Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act 117th Congress (2021-2022)
Rulemaking.--Not later than 2 years after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall issue a final rule amending Standard 108..[lots of text omitted]..to allow for the use on vehicles of adaptive driving beam headlamp systems.
Have you seen US trucks? It's like being transported back 50 years. Not only is NHTSA captured by lobbyists, they have clearly carved out a well isolated competitive island where US truck manufacturers can forever rest on ancient designs.
50 years in Germany: A rear underride guard was made mandatory in Germany by a 1973 law for vehicles registered on or after 1 January 1975 with a carriage height of 55 cm or more above ground.
They're called Mansfield bars in the US, named after the actress Jane Mansfield who died after colliding with a trailer. They're not required federally and not particularly effective as they're generally not inspected or maintained.
It's bonkers that the US named them but don't require them. They're called Mansfield Bars in the UK too, presumably because there isn't really a better or more descriptive name you can give them.
There's probably an "official" name in some dusty Ministry of Transport document like "side protection collision bar" or some such, and TÜV probably calls it something like "Seitenaufprallschutzgerätüberlaufschutzausrüstung" or some damn thing.
Oh, looks like I got that wrong. Rear bars are required, but the US standards are well lower than the Canadian ones and periodic inspection isn't required.
The US has them, but I think it's only on the rear of the trailer. A quick image search shows guards on the sides of European trailers, which would have been helpful in the crash from the article.
The article does talk about US rear underride guards as well, but notes that they were inadequate for many years. I've driven past a hastily draped over fatality from such a collision in the 2000s and have kept a wide berth from trailers since.
Maybe it was just my perception, but I remember driving in Germany (long time ago) and noting how trucks seemed to be driving at a reasonable speed over in the right lane.
Very different from highways in the US where trucks typically drive as if they were just another sedan on the road.
I really thought this was missing in the article. I understand that it's about the situation in the US, but at the very least a comparative analysis could've been made how the US regulatory environment differs from others around the world.
The vast vast majority of trucks are not filled to the brim (and even if they're at their weight limit, they often have "air" in the box).
"Lowboys" are mainly used for large construction equipment where they need the extra height.
A semi-trailer is a surprisingly cheap piece of equipment.
Some trucks that are special purpose use the lower areas (see https://www.mayflower.com for an example; household movers have more weight capacity than space).
Retrofitting loading docks to work with lower-floor vehicles would be trivial, not to mention many buildings that could not accept deliveries would be able to.
If the trucking industry didn't want to spend $127 per trailer to add underride protection, I doubt building owners will want to spend what is likely to be several thousand dollars or more on retrofitting their loading docks.
That presents problems navigating tight corners where tractor trailers already have difficulty. I see some trailers where the position of the wheels can be adjusted. I wonder if that is for weight distribution or for the roads planned to be driven.
Not a trucker, but I believe it's because trailers with lower ground clearance will bottom out if you aren't careful with your route planning. Things like rail crossing with aggressive approach and departure angles would be pretty risky with a low to the ground trailer.
Tires are certain height. You want a flat floor. And you want to maximise the surface area and the volume. As such only sensible option is to build above tires and for the full width. Thus the room in between.
I think a more sensible design would be to have the middle of the trailer low to the ground with a floor hump above the rear wheel well and the front where it hitches on to the truck, but that would make loading and unloading awkward.
One could imagine having a side door instead of or in addition to a back door, and a lower loading dock.
I get that a rectanglar storage compartment is easier to deal with in a lot of ways, but it just seems ridiculous to have a box riding four feet off the ground, with the wheels causing as much atmospheric drag as they possibly can. This seems like a solution you'd arrive at if you think energy is practically free, and wasting energy has no consequence. It also seems unnecessarily top-heavy, in addition to the safety problems mentioned in the article (and the underride guards proposed to mitigate the safety issue would most likely create even more wind resistance).
There's something I don't understand about this crash in particular:
It sounds like Marcos' death is blamed on the actions of the truck driver, as well as the lack of an under-ride bumper.
But don't we normally consider drivers responsible for crashing into objects towards which they're travelling?
It doesn't sound like a situation where the truck jumped into traffic suddenly from a hidden driveway:
> The truck edged out of a driveway and began, slowly, to turn left onto the road, blocking traffic in both directions.
I.e., wouldn't death have also been avoided if Marcos had been traveling at a speed that allowed him to stop in time? I'd think that addressing that (if I'm right) would save a lot more than ~100 lives/year.
We don't have enough details from the article to determine fault in this particular collision. I'm not familiar with that particular highway, but there are a lot of US highways where (legal) prevailing speeds are 40 mph or higher and there are driveways from which unprotected left turns are permitted.
I think including details specific collisions is probably a distraction. Regardless of fault, this type of collision happens; and does the estimate of 200 lives / year justify the cost of adding underguards on trailers? (and rightful grumping about poor quality of statistics)
That's separate from a policy to eliminate driveways on highways above a certain speed, or provide separation of directions to eliminate left turns, or a nationwide 25 mph speed limit, or a separate road network only for large trucks, or whatever proposal you have to reduce the speed of collision here.
Again, we don't know where the collision took place, this is just where I happened to look on the highway where it's roughly paralleling the Rio Grande. A speed limit of 60 mph on a well paved, two lane highway through a rural area is consistent with my expectations.
> But don't we normally consider drivers responsible for crashing into objects towards which they're travelling?
No. If you are traveling a highway at posted speed and have a green light, and someone makes a left turn across your path, you’re not responsible if you can’t stop in time. The turning vehicle must yield to all oncoming vehicles close enough to be a hazard.
Similarly no, you are not responsible if you hit a truck that simply pulls straight out onto a street with no regard for the oncoming vehicles, which have the right of way.
Bigger vehicles love utilizing "physics right of way" to get what they want and it sounds like that's what happened here. Even pick-up truck drivers do stuff where they basically put you in situations where you give them what they want or they run into you and take no damage. Big vehicles on the road are an absolute problem at all levels.
Less outrageous is the requirement in many jurisdictions for vehicles to avoid collisions when possible and providing a general principle that a vehicle with the right of way but still having the last clear chance to avoid a collision is at fault for failing to do so.
That would probably be no-fault in most US states (meaning both people are at fault). Basically unless you are hard stopped, each driver has some fault in any given accident.
As a sibling noted, we don't have enough information about the crash to know. Marcos might have believed the truck driver saw him and would stop and wait until he'd passed. He was driving on a highway; many highways in the US -- even those that are not divided and seem pretty smallish -- have speed limits of 50mph and higher. Sure, it's possible that Marcos could have done something to avoid the crash, but that doesn't mean it's his fault.
But I think it really just doesn't matter whose fault it was. Regardless of whether or not the crash itself was preventable, the death was preventable, if these trucking companies would spend a measly $127 per trailer to help protect drivers of normal-sized vehicles. People are fallible. We know this. The entire point of vehicle safety is to acknowledge that people will screw up, and to minimize the injury and loss of life when it happens.
(And I don't find it remotely persuasive that $127 per trailer is a huge burden on their "razor thin" margins. If they're not making more than $127 in profit _per haul_, the entire trucking industry would be unsustainably pointless.)
It happened to me previously to be surprised by a stopped vehicle on the road. All you need is a large SUV driving in front of you blocking your vision of anything ahead. Then the SUV changes lane suddenly to avoid the stopped vehicle. Good luck reacting in time especially if you don't keep a multi-second separation between you and the car in front.
I might see the truck edging out of a driveway and trust that they're going to properly yield right of way and not make themselves an obstacle. By the time I realize "my" mistake, I might not have enough distance to stop.
Without putting blame anywhere and independently of who has the right of way, don't you just have your preservation instinct kicking in telling you that just giving a bit of brakes is not a bad idea, and that the risk/gain ratio of losing 10 seconds of your day vs. getting killed is not worth it?
In motorcycle safety courses, you're taught to never assume that other drivers can see you, in fact you are encouraged to operate as if you're invisible, and ride accordingly.
Growing up, I was told that it's better to be alive than to be "right" as it pertains to right-of-way. You can either insist on continuing because it's your right, or you can brake early assuming they're going to cut you off.
Unfortunately I saw a video of a similar accident where the motorcycle driver slid under the truck which turned across the road unexpectedly in a similar way, and one of the wheels went over the rider. He survived for a couple of minutes, during which his riding buddy held his hand, and talked to him until the end.
Videos like this are quite disturbing but I would make watching some of them mandatory during the driving course. Some people just dont get they are literally driving lethal weapons.
Agreed. An even from a more trivial perspective, I overwhelmingly prefer to lose my right of way and 3' of my day rather than fork out thousands in body job on my car.
I just don't think it's realistic to completely remove risk of other people's actions while driving down a high speed road. You can't slow down to a crawl every time a vehicle is at the side of the road, or turning across your lane from the other side. Yes, you can drive defensively - but at some point if you're driving at 60mph you have to have some level of trust that other people won't pull out suddenly.
> don't you just have your preservation instinct kicking in
Admittedly, yes; often when I write “I might...” I’m imagining a perspective adjacent to my own. In theory, I’d take my foot off the gas, put it in a lower gear (“manual” automatic), and watch what the guy does (time pending). I doubt I would really not have enough time to stop given how much I pay attention when driving.
Still, it takes two to tango, as it goes. The driver who died presumably could have and should have been paying more attention. They’d be alive today if they’d been paying enough attention to stop. And they’d be alive today if the truck driver had been more responsible. Keep in mind, the truck driver was hardly risking their own life; this was a lack of consideration for the safety of others.
Ahh, the old wisdom used to tell the oppressed to shut up and stay docile..
As a cyclist I hear this all the time. A thinly veiled threat, if you ask me. "Stop pointing out things that could've been better with our infrastructure or traffic culture, or I'll run you over".
I agree with you, and I bike often. I just dont want to use my health and my life as an argument in figuring out who is right, when on the other side is just some dumb drunk dude on a pickup texting his buddy or reading twitter while driving
Respectfully, this is a tired meme and it needs to die. This is a defeatist attitude that just gets in the way of any progress on improving driving culture. I really would prefer I can just trust the other driver.
I don't think that's feasible. Human nature just doesn't work that way. I think we could potentially get to a point where we can trust the other drivers more than we can now -- and that alone would be a laudable goal -- but I don't think it's reasonable to expect we'll ever get to a point where it's safe to place 100% trust that another driver on the road will always do the right thing all the time.
So what we're left with is defensive driving. If a giant vehicle starts edging out into the road in front of you, assume that the driver doesn't see you at all, and act accordingly.
Frankly, I don't think it's a tired meme: it is absolutely better to be alive than to be right. And sometimes those actually are your only choices.
Citation needed. Look into Finnish driving culture; it seems quite reasonable to see it as nurture over nature. I believe that it would be difficult to effect such a change given the distance between different American subcultures but it’s been demonstrated that a society can actually choose to take this seriously.
> And sometimes those actually are your only choices.
This is the part that needs to die. I was still right when I chose to allow the other driver to cut me off; turns out I’m alive too. It’s not a dichotomy but treating it like it is suggests that the other driver was “right” because I yielded. They were not. I was right and I didn’t do anything dangerous.
As the article mentions, there is collaborative documentary that was produced with this story. You can watch it, and I think most FRONTLINE documentaries free on youtube:
I watched this last night, and it's always interesting to people in business talk about the cost of saving lives.
There was one point where the reporter was interviewing a guy from the ATA (American Trucking Associations) where the ATA person says that one lost life is too many. And this is very common across so many industries, safety first as they always say.
But then as soon as you put a cost associated with saving a life, the whole idea of safety first goes out the window. In this case, underrides are clearly avoidable and really don't cost that much to prevent. Retrofitted truck solutions are available, cheap, and easy to install.
It just irks me that so many industries preach about safety, but as soon as it has even the most minor impact on the bottom line, it becomes a hot topic. They should really be saying, "Safety first (but only after profits, shareholders, revenue, etc)"
I get that businesses need to make money to stay afloat, but with a profit margin of 14% [0], surely there is room to save some lives.
> There was one point where the reporter was interviewing a guy from the ATA (American Trucking Associations) where the ATA person says that one lost life is too many.
You see the same crap inside companies. All-hands rah-rah meetings or zoom calls or mass emails with this kind of stuff in it, then the next day, directives to the contrary. Or, the handbook says to do X, for safety reasons, but your supervisor says to do Y that will be impossible to accomplish if you do X, like you're supposed to.
In union shops the workers often have leverage to point at the handbook, laws, or contract, and tell their supervisor to get fucked, but others just have to deal with it or find another job. Ditto non-safety stuff like violating the company's own policies on shift scheduling, or overtime wage-theft, or any number of other things.
> But then as soon as you put a cost associated with saving a life, the whole idea of safety first goes out the window. In this case, underrides are clearly avoidable and really don't cost that much to prevent. Retrofitted truck solutions are available, cheap, and easy to install.
There's a reasonable argument to not even bother with retrofitting. This has been a known issue for decades, just start building it into new trailers, and eventually the old trailers will age out and/or become uninsurable.
> I watched this last night, and it's always interesting to people in business talk about the cost of saving lives.
My favorite example of this is the "children under 2 don't need their own airline seat". The idea was that if you required a separate seat, more people would drive. That in turn would lead to more fatalities as the fatality/mile in cars is so much higher than in planes.
I would also point out that if someone has purchased life insurance, they have explicitly made a decision about the cost of a life when they choose the amount of insurance they are willing to take on.
> I would also point out that if someone has purchased life insurance, they have explicitly made a decision about the cost of a life when they choose the amount of insurance they are willing to take on.
This doesn't follow. It's not as if you're only allowed to purchase life insurance if it somehow accounts for the entire "cost of your life", whatever that is. I doubt most policies and policy-buyers attempt to achieve that, though some might.
[EDIT] To expand a bit, I'm pretty sure a lot of policies are purchased with goal-oriented thinking, and that goal's usually not "account for the cost of the life": for an older person, it might be "ensure end-of-life expenses are covered". For a younger one, it might be "make sure my family's OK until they can recover from the loss, which I guesstimate to require $X" or "make sure my family can afford to remain where they are at least until the kids are out of school"
Most planners would tell you that you that you need insurance to replace your expected income (or the cost of replacing a non-working spouse's childcare). That amount will often be much less than you'd pay not to die.
I have a term decreasing life insurance policy, which means that the amount my estate gets will drop to zero by the end of the policy. It's not the value of my life that it's covering but the value of my mortgage.
> I would also point out that if someone has purchased life insurance, they have explicitly made a decision about the cost of a life when they choose the amount of insurance they are willing to take on.
Isn't that the amount they can afford, rather than the value? Their wage is roughly irrelevant to their value
Interesting. Isn't this the case everywhere? In European countries there are rules for where and when large trucks and trailers can go; inside cities, plenty of roads have size/weight limits, and outside, many roads allow trailer truck traffic only at night or during weekends.
Lots of US cities also have designated truck routes but no one enforces them and if a truck happens to kill someone on them, they collectively throw up their hands and go "unlucky".
I remember reading a claim that logistics companies will often tell their drivers to break traffic laws (ostensibly "only when it's not dangerous") and they consider any citations to be a cost of doing business.
While I can't really verify that's true, it tracks with behavior I see of truck drivers in tight quarters; it's been trending towards this "I'm turning and I barely care if you're able to stop in time" kind of behavior.
I get what you mean. The sibling comment about “incentives” helps to paint an even more complete picture. The drivers have a pay incentive to be impatient, increasing the number of instances in which they choose to do this sort of thing regardless of what Management “allows”. They’d just hope to get away with it.
I mean to bring up the point that Management is complicit in this. They might fire this driver as a token measure because someone died (part of me even sees the driver as a victim in such a scenario) but they’re not going to stop encouraging the behavior that gets people killed. It’s not much speculation that one of Management’s primary concerns right now is “how expensive” this is and probably not much consideration is given about how to improve the situation. (Especially not if the solutions are all cost and no gain; it would be irresponsible of them to lower their profitability if they’re publicly traded. /s)
“During discovery they obtained a seven-page document signed by executives from Utility and 10 other semitrailer companies. The document, drafted in 2004, was a pact struck by the biggest companies in the business, a pledge to work cooperatively — and secretly — to thwart any lawsuits stemming from side and rear underride crashes. The arrangement had been orchestrated by Glen Darbyshire, an attorney for the TTMA, the trade group.
As part of the agreement, the firms would keep crucial safety information confidential. That material — including ‘documents, factual material, mental impressions, interview reports, expert reports, and other information’ — wasn’t to be shared with anyone outside of the circle.”
This…sounds like someone took notes on their criminal conspiracy.
I see several comments focusing on the ridiculous figure of $127. Please don't make arguments based on that. It's off by at least an order of magnitude:
And certainly we can have all the same arguments about the cost of a human life vs. corporate greed, etc. etc. at a more realistic price.
But what this really speaks to is the level of honesty and accuracy of this article. It's a hit piece and is extremely one-sided propaganda, regardless of what anyone thinks is the right thing to do about better bumpers.
>>It was a little after 7 p.m. and Ricardo Marcos was rolling through the darkness in his gray Hyundai Elantra. Marcos had spent a long day toiling as a mechanic at a trucking company in McAllen, Texas, a sunbaked city nestled right on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Reading the opening story, it sounds like he fell asleep or wasn't paying attention. We will never know, but it's very sad no matter. It's also true, assuming he fell asleep, he could have killed others, as happened to Rod Bramblett and his wife, radio announcer for the Auburn Tigers, who was killed at a stoplight when rear ended by a driver who fell asleep while driving at a high rate of speed. Another sad story.
Hitting an 80,000lb mass in any configuration at high speed is going to be nasty no matter what. One option is to ask truckers to provide heavy bumpers and crumple zones and airbags around their trucks. The other option is to operate your vehicle safely, reducing speed if visibility is limited, etc.
I dont doubt that rear bumpers being stronger would be a good start, but by the same token, the starting assumption of a car rear ending a very large object at 60mph head-on does not seem like a scenario to weigh too heavily in the grand scheme.
However, maybe there is a compromise of better rear guards and 20% additional side coverage by guards? i.e. dont make perfect the enemy of good.
The purpose of the NHTSA and vehicle safety regulations broadly is not to litigate who is at fault in an accident and sentence them to death, it is to make traveling on the road by motor vehicle or bicycle or foot as safe as is feasible given costs and available technology and data about the nature of injuries in collisions. Most people most of the time are in control of their vehicles and are paying attention to the road. But every single person that drives a car will make a mistake, become distracted, suffer a mechanical failure, or become unavoidably implicated in the mistake of another road user.
Slamming into the back or coming through the side of a semi-trailer is not something that just happens to "dangerous drivers". It is something that can happen to anyone placed in the wrong place at the wrong time.
That said, the position of the regulators and trucking industry at present make sense, underride crash data indicates that the costs of proposed safety measures could be better spent improving other known road-safety issues with known or projected solutions. And the point that TFA is making is that NHTSA data is severely underreporting underride crash incidents in the sample that they investigated, making underride crash safety regulations worthwhile.
And the mass of the vehicle is really not the issue in this sort of collision. This type of collision would occur in the same exact way if the trailers weighed 1,000 lbs, the bottom of the trailer would shred through the windshield and decapitate the occupants. A better underride guard would turn an unknown number of fatal accidents into scary crashes that people walk away from unharmed.
Sorry, saying mass doesn't matter is a false assertion. A 1000lb trailer will absolutely react differently in this scenario, including getting pushed up and out or yielding/crushing.
NHTSA also has to weigh the cost of compliance. Cars also could have stronger A pillars, that way the burden of compliance is placed on the one at higher risk.
The article tries to make it a big conspiracy by Big Truck, that bothered me. Trucks are easy to hate on, but efficient transport over very long distances is a tremendous strength of the American economy.
> The article tries to make it a big conspiracy by Big Truck, that bothered me.
I mean, one of the people who sued uncovered evidence of a literal conspiracy to hide safety-related data, so I'm not sure why the article's framing should bother you.
> Cars also could have stronger A pillars, that way the burden of compliance is placed on the one at higher risk.
That's not a completely unreasonable take, but my position is that the thing that causes the damage -- the trailer -- should be required to be made less lethal.
It's also unclear that A pillars can be made strong enough to survive those situations anyway. And even if they can, the car's crumple zones (which absorb kinetic energy) won't end up getting "used" in this type of crash, so the A pillar will take all the force, stop the car way faster than an impact on crumple zones would, and throw the driver forward much harder than in other types of crashes, possibly still fatally.
The US basically ignores transport efficiency though. Otherwise, there's be shipping on boats within the US
Why not put the burden of compliance of the operators creating the risk?
Otherwise, the trucks will build themselves bigger, such that the improved aframes are no longer sufficient. Somebody walking around with a bomb doesn't make it reasonable for everyone else to have to bomb proof everything
> Slamming into the back or coming through the side of a semi-trailer is not something that just happens to "dangerous drivers". It is something that can happen to anyone placed in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It's certainly an avoidable mistake, especially on an open highway where the trailer was 'edging slowly' out into traffic. Failing to avoid it results in danger. The article doesn't even mention extenuating circumstances such as a blind turn or something, but even if that were the case, the situation would simply require extra caution to successfully navigate the dangerous area.
"Dangerous" doesn't have to mean intentionally so or that the driver was reckless; the danger could simply be in lacking the experience to recognize the danger that exists.
Fortunately, if you avoided listening to environmentalists, transit advocates, and people with children and bought a high ride-height vehicle like a Dodge Ram 1500, your vehicle will be tall enough to actually contact the truck or trailer without a decapitation!
Pickups and SUVs are way safer, guys. Up to you what you do with the information.
The NHTSA stats seem to somewhat contradict this claim. Looks like light trucks (< 10k lbs) have historically had a higher fatal crash rate, both per mile traveled, and per registered vehicle, than passenger cars, up through 2015. The numbers have equalized and maybe gone slightly lower only in the last ~8 years, but certainly not “way” lower. The injury-crash numbers are lower for trucks, so you might be less likely to get injured in a truck, but no less likely to die.
Trucks are heavier and have a longer stopping distance, and for a long time (until 1999) they had much lower safety standards than passenger cars. That’s not to mention it’s maybe short-sighted to ignore many legitimate concerns about air quality, fuel efficiency, children, and where to park, since under-ride crashes are only a teeny tiny fraction of fatal crashes involving any vehicles. I’m pretty sure you’re way better off from a safety perspective just driving a little slower than buying a truck, all else being equal.
The dumb thing is that making semis aerodynamic likely will encompass something that would make them safer for other vehicles. You need to fill in the space under the tractor. A fairing would save money and lives.
Hundreds! AKA >1 in a million odds each year. Can't spare brain cycles on this. It sounds like someone else is already thinking about it. I believe in them.
> "The Truck Trailer Manufacturers Association, a lobbying outfit representing semitrailer builders, had little desire to make safer rear guards. In correspondence with the department, the TTMA said it would be 'far more practical' to force Volkswagen and other companies making compact cars to produce larger vehicles that were less likely to slip beneath a truck."
Assuming you're being serious (god I hope not; how ignorant), no, that's not the problem. Sure, tiny tiny cars are more vulnerable in a crash, but we're talking about normal-size sedans here. Even a smaller SUV probably wouldn't fare so well.
Don't forget that Nixon established the EPA. So he wasn't entirely anti-regulation. (or maybe there were political pressures, I don't know the details.)
Environmental protection was historically a conservative thing. "Conservation" and all that. Free markets were a left-wing thing in the past. These things aren't set in stone.
This article is intentionally written to sidestep the victim driver's own responsibility. It's hard to underride into a truck if you're driving attentively.
That's not to say they are wrong, if the fix is as simple and as cheap as described. I do value the expose of the politics around the non-action, even if TFA has other faults.
Mandatory AEB (automatic emergency braking) systems should address it to some degree, albeit only in new cars. There's no reason we shouldn't do both.
There’s a second accident cited where the truck changed lanes suddenly and trapped the car next to them under the trailer and dragged it for quite distance. Then the car caught fire and the driver was burned to death. Sounds like it’s pretty easy to underride if the truck changes lanes or swerved into you. Not a victim that I would blame.
What about the accident where the truck blew through a stop sign at 40mph and the victim was wedged underneath the trailer. I wouldn’t blame that victim either for not avoiding a truck moving at speed outside their line of sight.
What about the person who was rear-ended and propelled under the truck in front of them. Should that victim be blamed for their lack of attentiveness?
Yeah, people can be better drivers, but we also shouldn’t allow known hazards on the road. Even if it costs equipment manufacturers several hundred more dollars
I did. You are cherry picking the accidents where it's quite clear the victim did nothing wrong. There are other accidents described where I find it hard to draw that conclusion. There are only about 4-5 accidents described out of about 400 in 2021 (an undercount per the article).
Have you been on the road? It's very dangerous due to most drivers around you being absolutely awful and inattentive. At least in the USA which is the concern in this article. I swear, not a day goes by where someone either in front or behind me pulls off onto the shoulder to do a heavy braking, surprised that traffic in front is slowing. Whereas truck drivers IME tend to be the most attentive and good drivers. (Of course there are exceptions and the trucks are massive so they have an outsized result.) At least in california. So I'm hard pressed to believe that most of those 400+ annual accidents are the fault of the truck driver.
> we also shouldn’t allow known hazards on the road.
Agreed, and I said as much. Why the NHTSA is not acting on this is beyond my understanding. As well, I noted that I endorse AEB, even though it's a negative for me personally due to 100% false positive events in my own usage. AEB will fix far more hazards than trailer underride guards. Again, that doesn't mean we shouldn't do both.
This is why non-level crossings, armcos, botts dots, LED traffic signals, and so on are all great things. Sure an excellent, courteous and attentive driver doesn't need any of those. It doesn't mean we shouldn't have them, and I said as much re underride guards.
I think you are misreading my comment as victim blaming and reacting to that. That's not what I said.
I'm not cherry picking accidents. I literally highlighted every single one of the contemporary accidents mentioned in the article except the one accident from the lead paragraph that you seemed to be talking about. Mandatory AEB on cars only addresses one possible mechanism of underride, and not even the ones listed in the article. I also recall one of the first Tesla Autopilot fatalities being underride that wasn't detected by the AEB. Adding passive safety like guards simply eliminates the possibility of underride, at much lower cost.
> I think you are misreading my comment as victim blaming and reacting to that. That's not what I said.
Here's what you said: "This article is intentionally written to sidestep the victim driver's own responsibility. It's hard to underride into a truck if you're driving attentively."
You are directly placing responsibility on the victim for the circumstances that led them to be a victim. The examples given show that the victim driver either had right of way or no control of the circumstances. I don't see how that could possibly NOT be victim blaming.
The victim driver's responsibility is irrelevant. We know that, regardless of education or licensing requirements, people will screw up sometimes when they drive. We can either just throw up our hands and accept the already-ridiculously-high death toll, or we can require that our vehicles are safer and do more to protect people. Personally I'm in favor of the latter, and don't particularly care who is at fault in these kinds of crashes.
(And in this case we don't have enough information to know if the driver could have reasonably avoided the crash, anyway.)
>According to NHTSA’s latest figures, more than 400 people died in underride crashes in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available. But experts say the true number of deaths is likely higher.
>The technology at issue — strong steel guards mounted to the back and sides of trucks — is simple and “relatively inexpensive,” Friedman argued. “The costs are small.”
>Then again, cars could all come with roll cages and five-point harnesses, and they don't, so there's some limit to safety equipment.
No roll cages historically was the result of no federal safety belt law. Roll cages are great until an un-belted occupant has their head hit the cage. "Second collision."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_impact_(safety)
At this point New Hampshire is the last remaining holdout on state safety belt laws. Live free or die (in a car crash).
Even then, you still have the issue of noncompliance. Automakers don't want to end up on 60 Minutes in an episode about how their "safer car" kills some people, because some of those people were un-belted in a crash. Numbers are all over the place for people not wearing their seat belt, but it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 in 10.
Most modern passenger car passenger cells don't need roll cages because their passenger safety cells are properly engineered, and because crash safety is much more comprehensive, with wheels and suspension components designed to intentionally fail and crumple in a crash so they aren't pushed into the passenger cell.
A ton of cars pass Euro-NCAP and IIHS crash and rollover tests with flying colors.
Obviously not every car is up to snuff, especially at the bottom end of the market. You couldn't pay me to drive a current production GM, Ford, Suzuki, Mitsubishi, etc compact sedan.
5-point harnesses aren't really that necessary at 0-60mph speeds in a vehicle with modern airbags; the fifth strap is mostly for anti-submarining but a number of manufacturers have produced seats that are anti-submarining and anti-submarining dashboard design (both material and shape) is a thing as well.
All of it's possible, it's just a lot of car companies are cheap and consumers don't really shop based on stuff like "is there an anti-submarining design to the dash."
A well-built roll cage should prevent the very issue that is under discussion here (it should shove the truck up or the car down, not decapitate the driver).
What exactly do you do with the publicity? You're a B2B company. I've never heard of someone calling up Safeway and asking if they use SafeGuards Trucking over RideHighOrDie Trucking. Literally zero incentive.
If that's how you truly feel, please move out into the wilderness and completely cut yourself off from society. If you want to live in society, then you have to put up with the rest of us actually caring about making things safer for the average (or below-average) driver, not just you, the apparent perfect driver who will never end up in a car crash, ever, because of course you have perfect control over everything around you, including the actions of all the other drivers on the road.
> Regulators have long-since become a bunch of career busybodies [...] I want it to stop. [...] I support "hands-free"/anti distraction traffic laws. Zero cost
That's a regulation, and it costs police resources to enforce it. Stop contradicting yourself.
There are also many more roundabouts, and they seem to be especially favoured near factories and at other locations where lorries are especially likely to make turns.
The road mentioned in the article has two lanes in each direction and a speed limit of 75mph (120km/h). The major junctions are fully grade-separated, but there are many flat junctions.
Apply this sort of thinking to every facet of modern life, and we will have death by a thousand safety-conscious cuts. This article is based on eliciting an emotional response and by a statistical argument. Of course if we adopt the safety measures then things will be safer. "It's only $XXX. Doesn't that seem like a small amount?" "It's lives we're talking about. Why does money matter?" That's an emotional, illogical argument. Now multiply that amount by all of the areas where safety could be better, and all of a sudden, we start to see why things are the way that they are.
$127 for a heavier rear guard and side guard. What about the change in operating costs from the increased weight and aerodynamic losses?
We could limit all drivers to 30 mph everywhere too. Save lives and gas. Think of the children!
We make cost-benefit tradeoffs on regulation all the time.
The EPA uses a value of 7.2 million dollars (2006 dollars) for a life saved [1]:
So if adding guards to trucks would save, say, 50% of the lives lost in underride crashes, that would give you a benefit of 200 * 7.2 million * (inflation adjustment). You'd also want to add in the benefits of reduced non-fatal injuries. But for the purposes of argument, let's imagine the benefits of imposing this regulation are roughly 1 billion dollars a year.
All the costs you're talking about are measurable. It's not that hard to then figure out the costs of imposing the regulation and see whether the benefits outweigh the costs.
And this is one of the simpler cases where there aren't complicating factors like privacy or liberty at stake. You're not requiring truck drivers or trucking companies to change their behaviour. All you're asking them to do is fit a couple of extra pieces of steel to their trailers.
The above is "an emotional, illogical argument". The logical argument is that a burden paid by all is sometimes necessary when there are significant risks. This article goes to many lengths to visualize the risks in examples with and without guards. Admittedly, it doesn't have many counter-examples, nor examples from vehicles other than sedans and older cars. And it cites costs from the 1980s rather than today's costs. But when sedans on the road outnumber trucks, the risk starts to seem equivalent to a flight safety issue where we've known for years that the planes caused fatal injuries but we never addressed it.
If there's a blindness in this article, it's not so much the trucking industry response as it is the question of whether or not this has been implemented anywhere else in the world? https://www.reifflawfirm.com/canadian-and-european-truck-und... suggests that, "in Europe since 1994, front underride guards and side underride guards have been required on large trucks," and that these were strengthened in 2007.
That same page suggests front and side (of truck) collisions with a passenger vehicle are more likely than rear collisions, and that existing US and Canadian protections aren't strong enough.
Am I understanding correctly that your argument is basically "fuck human lives if there's any barrier to making anything even a tad safer that will save some of them"? Where does your logic stop? What about seat belts, how much do they cost to add to vehicles?? Or airbags? Or any of the other safety features that have already been added? Or to go out of cars, infrastructure design - do you know how much more it costs to make sure that bridge/building won't fall apart? Or how much it costs to have multiple exit points from venues with hundreds of people?
Safety regulations are written in blood, lots of it.
When you propose a change that makes food less efficient to ship, you increase the number of people who struggle to feed their families — and make the challenge worse for those who already are struggling.
What the person you’re replying to is saying is that you have to balance the benefits (fewer truck crashes) against the costs (more hungry people) — and that such a choice isn’t nearly as simple as shallow histrionics, about how we must spend money to save lives!
I think your shallow false dichotomy, rather than engaging with the fact that economics also costs lives and causes human suffering, is exactly the problem.
A statistical life is worth $1-10 million, and this policy costs $127 * 4 million trucks (not counting fuel), so $1.25 million per life the first year and less after that. So it may be a logical argument couched in emotional terms.
Perhaps the trucking companies' position is a negotiating tactic too. I don't see why they should have to pay the entire cost of a solution that benefits society more than themselves; that's what taxes are for.
Do you really believe that it will cost $125, including installation? It’s probably a large multiple of that. Add in the aerodynamics, and it might not pass the cost/benefit analysis.
It should be easy to find out. The side and rear bars have been mandatory in Europe for decades, and are available as an option where European vehicles are sold abroad.
Not going to defend NHTSA here, but it's a good idea to pass laws like this. NHTSA would likely have been sued if they passed the rule. Having a law really cuts down on the lawsuits.
After reading 5th Risk by Michael Lewis, I updated my thinking about government agencies. Government agencies are often quite limited by law and cannot advocate for effective policies. Lawmakers really should be updating rules much more often in consultation with agency scientists and specialists. I feel like we've gotten used to lawmakers not doing the jobs they are elected to.
I also believe that we should have a Greenhouse Gas Administration, and not rely on the EPA and Clean Air and Water Acts to cover CO2.